Mary-Beth Laviolette

With a speciality in Alberta visual art, Mary-Beth Laviolette has worked for over a decade as a contract curator – researching and organizing exhibitions for public art galleries in Alberta including: Glenbow Museum (Calgary), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (Banff), Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery, The Esplanade Gallery (Medicine Hat), Galt Museum (Lethbridge), Okotoks Art Gallery and Lougheed House (Calgary).

She has also collaborated as an art curator in commissioning new artwork and securing long term loans for YW HUB (a social housing project encompassing a community centre, daycare, gym, classrooms and housing for single women in Calgary); Mikai’sto/Red Crow Community College Standoff, AB (Canada’s first reserve-based post-secondary college with commissions by Blackfoot artists) and the family shelter Inn From the Cold in downtown Calgary.

Laviolette’s books include: An Alberta Art Chronicle; A Delicate Art: Artists, Wildflowers & Native Plants of the West; Old Man’s Garden: The History and Lore of Southern Alberta Wildflowers; and Greatest Garden: The Paintings of David More. She lives in Canmore.

FESTIVAL BOOK

Greatest Garden: The Paintings of David More

An exploration of the garden through a lifetime of artwork by noted western Canadian painter David More.

David More is one of western Canada’s exceptional painters. Based in the rural hamlet of Benalto, near Red Deer Alberta, he is part of a generation of landscape artists who emerged in the 1970s to make beauty out of the ordinary and challenge the expected with bold acts of creation.

Throughout his career, More has returned to the garden as a deeply functional yet ritualistic space of human endeavour. The garden is a place of shelter and sanctuary, of colour and fragrance, of order and wilderness. The garden is a private space, carefully tended and planted, observed en plein air or through the living-room window. The garden is a public space, a park where people gather to let their natures blossom. The garden is the world, the nature that sustains and surround us, the environment we all live within, and all have a responsibility to cultivate and tend.

Greatest Garden is a celebration of David More’s engagement with the garden as a multifaceted subject. Featuring over fifty original artworks, this book encompasses a career spent in conversation with gardens in their many and varied forms. With lively brushwork, a keen sense of colour, and an aptitude for expressive drawing and varied composition, More has found the garden in expected and unexpected places. In Greatest Garden you are welcomed to walk its sunlit paths.

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Shelf Life Books

Old Man’s Garden: The History and Lore of Southern Alberta Wildflowers

Through pen and ink illustrations and stories, Old Man’s Garden conveys the legends and folklore connected with Southern Alberta’s wildflowers, native plants, and Indigenous culture.

Originally published in 1954, Annora Brown’s Old Man’s Garden is a Canadian classic that tells the story of Southern Alberta’s native plants and wildflowers through art and in consideration of Indigenous traditional knowledge from the region.

Accompanying this new edition of Old Man’s Garden, Sidney Black of Fort Macleod, the Indigenous Anglican Bishop for Treaty 7, provides his own commentary about Brown’s art and writing in relation to the Blackfoot, while independent art curator Mary-Beth Laviolette broadens the story about the artist’s contribution to Canadian art.

Also included in this new edition are full-colour images of Brown’s later paintings of Blackfoot lodges (tipis) and regalia, the dramatic landscape of the Oldman River region such as Waterton National Park, and her abiding, lifelong regard for the flora of her homeland.

According to Brown, Old Man’s Garden is a “book of gossip about the flowers of the West.” A one-of-a-kind work featuring 169 black-and-white drawings of flowers and native plants, this classic text is about more than botany. Throughout its pages there is a sparkle to her stories of early exploration and settlement, her concern for conservation, and her regard for the Blackfoot Nation, and Indigenous culture.

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Shelf Life Books | Calgary Public Library